New website.

Gary, I remember your original thread and what you're trying to achieve, but I think that you have hugely overdone the SEO work in the narrative. At the moment it reads exactly like a Google trap (which effectively is what it's designed to be), which might well put people off.

Rather than just repeating key phrases you need to work on a combination of header tags (<h1>) which are incredibly important and relevant text, but without overdoing it. The balance is a difficult thing to get right, but well worth the effort.

The other two things that you're missing out on are the Keyword and Description metatags. The importance of Keywords is frequently debated, but getting 10 to 20 punchy, relevant words (per page) that correspond to the text is probably the best way forward.

Description is very important. That is the text that appears under the blue page title on Google, and also forms part of the SE search parameters.

The banner need some work (as mentioned) as I suspect that the conversion to a GIF with transparency has left the artefacts. PNG is probably your best bet.

It's probably not worth going into structure too deeply as you're only concentrating on the intro page at the moment, but rather than have a front page leading into the site, I'd make that one the landing page and then navigate with a menu under the header/banner.

On the plus side, I like the simplicity of the overall design and the choice of photographs.

One final idea...

It might be worth investigating the possibility of reciprocal linking with the venues that you've named. Doing that means that you can turn them into live links, which would look a bit better than just a straight forward location list.

Hope that's of some use! :)
 
Not bad. I would save your banner text as a .png to remove the rasterisation around the edges I am getting Safari.

Alternatively if your up to it you can accomplish a better looking banner using CSS3 or even the text-shadow and font-family classes in CSS2

I had it saved as a .png and it wasn't working in IE 6?! any ideas what the problem was
 
Thanks for your great comments. All taken into consideration. :)


Gary, I remember your original thread and what you're trying to achieve, but I think that you have hugely overdone the SEO work in the narrative. At the moment it reads exactly like a Google trap (which effectively is what it's designed to be), which might well put people off.

Rather than just repeating key phrases you need to work on a combination of header tags (<h1>) which are incredibly important and relevant text, but without overdoing it. The balance is a difficult thing to get right, but well worth the effort.

The other two things that you're missing out on are the Keyword and Description metatags. The importance of Keywords is frequently debated, but getting 10 to 20 punchy, relevant words (per page) that correspond to the text is probably the best way forward.

Description is very important. That is the text that appears under the blue page title on Google, and also forms part of the SE search parameters.

The banner need some work (as mentioned) as I suspect that the conversion to a GIF with transparency has left the artefacts. PNG is probably your best bet.

It's probably not worth going into structure too deeply as you're only concentrating on the intro page at the moment, but rather than have a front page leading into the site, I'd make that one the landing page and then navigate with a menu under the header/banner.

On the plus side, I like the simplicity of the overall design and the choice of photographs.

One final idea...

It might be worth investigating the possibility of reciprocal linking with the venues that you've named. Doing that means that you can turn them into live links, which would look a bit better than just a straight forward location list.

Hope that's of some use! :)
 
I had it saved as a .png and it wasn't working in IE 6?! any ideas what the problem was

From memory, I think there is an issue with IE and .png. An option is to use a conditional comment to display the .gif image if IE 6 or whatever is the browser, and display .png for the better browsers!

Personally, I agree that the heading image be changed. It looks bad in Firefox. Why not use an H1 and put it in text rather than use an image? Especially since it is just plain text saved as an image.

I'm not convinced that meta tags are that important, can't harm, but google ignores them.
 
If you're talking about Keywords then I'd possibly agree (the jury's still out on that after yet another shift in their algorithms), but Google definitely takes a range of metatags into account; Description being one of the more important ones.
 
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